Mixing pinstripes and argyle, and I will not be stopped. A deep-rooted obsession with combining gray and eggplant is to blame. My bedroom is a variety of grays and eggplant/plum shades, the only non-black tattoos I have are deep violet, I’m an avid consumer of purple vegetables and so on. The big squishy eggplanty scarf you see here came from a street vendor in Venice and cost all of $10 unlike some of the popular versions which have peaked in popularity recently. These are often overpriced and worn in ways I cannot approve. (Example)

Moving on, however, let us talk of 3/4 length coats. Rather, let me sing praises to them, because there is just no better-looking fit. A good 3/4 length jacket makes one look taller and better-proportioned through the sheer magic of its construction. This is true for boys and girls alike, and believe me when I say that few visions are more dashing than a man in a pair of slim pants and a 3/4 length coat. Onward, to the rest of the photos!

A photo from one of General Tom Thumb’s successful tours in Europe.

Charles Sherwood Stratton was born today in 1838. His birth weight was a hearty 9 pounds, 2 ounces. For the first 6 months of his life, Charles continued to develop normally. Then, quite suddenly, he stopped growing. On his first birthday, the boy’s chagrined parents realized he hadn’t grown an inch or an ounce in half a year. They took him to a doctor, who told them it was unlikely their child would ever reach a normal height (he mostly likely suffered from pituitary gland malfunctions). Charles was a little over two feet tall and weighed 15 pounds.

Left: a playbill featuring the General’s many talents. Right: Stratton as a young child.

The embarrassed Strattons muddled along with their tiny son for four years until P.T. Barnum heard tell of the boy and negotiated with them to exhibit Charles on a trial basis in Barnum’s own NY museum. The family was paid a princely sum of 3 bucks a week plus room, board and travel expenses for Charles and his mother.

At first glance, supermodel Iekeliene Stange looks like another cool specimen of Alien Beauty, joining the ranks of Sasha Pivovarova and Gemma Ward. But snapshots of Iekeliene’s personal style reveal another, charmingly goofier portrait.

Iekeliene (pronounced Ee-kel-een-ah) was discovered as a multimedia student in Holland, and didn’t know much about fashion before becoming a model. “I was a little punk rocker with red dreadlocks, a nose ring, and covered in rainbow bracelets,” she recently told Teen Vogue. Though she’s had to tone down her look for the runway, Stange still keeps it weird in regards to personal style, as can be seen below. Her hobbies include “photography, making amazing tutu’s and keeping it real.” Too cute!

• Iekeline Stange fan page (tons of pictures!)
• More pictures of Iekeliene’s personal style
• Video interview with Iekeliene on Flasher

– her cheekbones are very distracting in this video

Artist Soomi Park from Seoul has created a set of LED eyelashes that light up in the dark. In an interview with We Make Money Not Art, Park describes the motivation behind her design:

I tried to project Korean’s obsession to big eyes, and how this fetishism is interpreted into excessive plastic surgery done on the eyes among Korean women. I really thought the obsession with big eyes can be represented through media design, because both yearning for bigger eyes and projecting the look through lights can be done by distorting the representation and creating new images. The LED Eyelashes have a mercury sensor that controls the light on the face. When wearing the LED eyelashes, you look embellished as if you were wearing a piece of fashion jewelry.

Politicized wearable art that invokes cybernetic technology? Marry me! In truth, you had me at “light-up lashes.” Read the article for more about the eyelashes and about Park’s compelling Digital Veil projet. The article mistakenly refers to Soomi as a boy, but she corrects the misconception in the comments. The interview is excellent nonetheless.

Related:

• 5 Ways to Feel Like a Replicant
• May Your Nights be Aglow with Cats

Twenty1f takes a look back at some of the future-forward designs of the year. I love the metal leggings from Balenciaga and the body contoured molds of McQueen, though much of the rest of his fall wasn’t to my liking.

Alexander Mcqueen Fall ‘07 collection

It is amusing, however, that this McQueen show, inspired by his bloodline tracing back to a victim of the Salem witch trials, got bad reviews not for the designs, but for use of darque imagery the audience found distracting. From style.com: “there was a pentagram traced in red in a black-sand circle, with an inverted pyramid hanging over it. As the show started, a macabre film—of naked women, swarming locusts, faces decaying to skulls, and blood and fire—started to play above the models’ heads”. Oh Alexander!

Balenciaga Spring ‘07 collection

This line was inspired by designer Nicolas Ghesquière watching Tron and Terminator. See it all here.

No party dresses today! Time to throw on some battle gear and greet the new year with renewed powers. Welcome it sweetly and wrangle it at an opportune moment. We only get so many of these new years so don’t frown on resolutions, squidlings, especially if you’ve the capacity to stick to them. Find a night just for you this week and set some damn goals. You can doo eeet!

Increasingly popular mask sweatshirts were recently banned by the administrators of Orange County’s Capistrano Unified School District. The concerned officials sent out mass emails warning parents to remember, while doing their holiday shopping, that kids won’t be able to wear such sweatshirts on campus. Tom Ressler, the principal of Capistrano Valley High said “There is no way to identify who kids are. Generally, we don’t think that is a good thing. It gives kids the opportunity to do something bad”.

The goggle jacket is causing a commotion in England – it isn’t illegal, but apparently the look is perturbing anyhow. According to AFP “models with dark colors convey the image of commandos or criminals, while ones with light colors give the impression of a nuclear or biological catastrophe”.

Just a little longer until the mass hysteria subsides and we can resume our lives. While I do not personally condone babies or Jesus and am thus left cold to the concept of Christmas, I adore New Year’s Eve. Turning of the tides, a symbolic clean slate – the lot of it, I dig. Presents and snow are pretty great as well. I even like seeing sparkling decorated houses but what I do take issue with [besides the ever-present music] is people wearing Santa hats. Just, you know, out. Shopping, driving, what have you. What does it mean?

Yesterday while traversing the already-dangerous terrain of a mall I saw a woman, ahead of me in line, wearing an oddly filthy and balding Santa hat. To her credit she was carrying a coordinating red purse. That unfortunate hat, however, made me think for a moment this was a misguided vagrant robbing the place. Why did she do it? I imagine it as a signal of despair, an S.O.S. flag breaking out of the sea of Christmas psychosis. Or is it a beacon of acceptance? Whatever reason you might have, from a stylistic standpoint I strongly suggest saving the hat until you get to the party if you really must wear one.

To cleanse your palate of the awful goth fashion I inflicted on you yesterday, here are pictures of some hawt men wearing fashions from centuries past, mainly Victorian.

You can see the rest of the images here, courtesy of my friend Kat. Not sure which fashion magazine these came from, but YEAH!

Gloves + cane + covered neck = I’d hit it like the angry fist of god.

That was the Tank Girl of the 90s, the one I fell in love with. We didn’t hear from her for over a decade, but this year she re-emerged in The Gifting, a new series by Alan Martin (the original creator) and illustrator Ashley Wood. What does the Tank Girl of 2007 look like? Alan Martin had the following to say:

Here’s the emerging new look for Tank Girl. We were concerned that she didn’t make her re-appearance in the same, tired old clothes that she bowed out in some twelve years ago. What was alternative, upsetting, anarchic, and just plain odd-ball back then has since become common place. Mainstream media smothers us daily with punky chic, and modern day babies can be seen sporting spikey hairdos and Travis Bickle T-shirts. The uniform of the cultural revolutionary has been sold to The Man. So how to rebel? How give the finger to the fashion fascists? Normal is the only way ahead. Dress like a high school teacher from the mid-eighties, or pick clothes from your boring aunty’s wardrobe. The only way left to rebel is to dress like you’re not rebelling. We hope to bring a whole different flavour to Tank Girl, as she borrows ideas from past cultural reference points (Fay Dunaway in Bonnie & Clyde, anyone?).

I completely feel what Alan Martin is saying. I like the look of the new Tank Girl drawings. However, the old-school, combat-boot-wearing, band-aid-covered, baseball-bat-wielding, kinda-dykey Tank Girl of yore will always hold a very dear place in my heart.

I’ll come out and say it: I love Ashley Wood’s amazing drawing style, but the new Tank Girl look doesn’t really do it for me. Maybe I’m being way too nostalgic, but it’s also possible that what I’m reacting to is the idea that so many people have decided to rebel by not-trying-to-look-rebellious that it’s starting to look like an easy way out of any real effort. I’m not saying that to undermine Martin’s very important message (see our Hot Topic Rebranding post), but it may be possible that so many people have caught onto the “rebel by looking normal” notion, and so many are using it to lazily avoid any attempts at interesting self-expression through clothing, that I’m just hoping that the pendulum swings back to the other side. You know, the side with the band-aids and corrugated tubing and knee pads.

But I guess I should get over it and enjoy the story. Comic book characters change, if it’s a good comic. When Maggie from Love and Rockets gained weight and creator Jaime Hernandez insisted that this was the way that Maggie was meant to be, I thought that was incredibly touching and honest. It’s impossible to keep up a certain look forever, and the story can be just as interesting once that look is gone.